This Can Best Be Handled In Classrooms

Mary Ann Bailer once saw a teenager shoplifting in a store near her home in Southwest Washington. She didn’t know him from Adam, but that didn’t stop the diminutive Bailer from striding right up to strapping lad and telling him (in a teeth-clinched whisper): “If you don’t put that back, I’m going to kick you up your butt.”

The boy smiled sheepishly and did as he was told.

I thought about Mary Ann (now a grandmother four times over) the other day when I read of a controversial new proposal from a member of the Prince George’s County school board. Marilynn Bland would require teachers in that Washington suburb to correct students when they speak improper English - not just in classrooms but also in cafeterias and hallways.

Bland, who like three-quarters of the county’s students, is African American, thinks the schools aren’t doing as much as they could to develop their students’ language skills. And she’s certain the youngsters - particularly black youngsters - will pay the price of that neglect: in lost opportunities and lost respect.

I agree with her on both counts. But I don’t support her proposal.

How can I say that while remembering the Mary Ann Bailer incident so fondly? Two reasons. First, the Bailer incident happened a lot of years ago and things are not quite the way they used to be. Second, not everybody is a Mary Ann Bailer. This woman had - has - the special gift of communicating not just disapproval of the misbehavior but also genuine caring for the misbehaver.

I might care as much as she, but I couldn’t count on instant recognition of that fact. Trying to mimic her approach, I might wind up getting punched out by some petty thief. Nor is it just the fact that I’m a man. Few women could get away with what Mary Ann routinely gets away with. Not just with teenage boys, but anybody: Young mothers from the housing projects near her middle class condo, strangers on the street, derelicts, you.

“Honey, you don’t need to be carrying that much weight,” she’d say to a young woman she’d never seen before. “Why don’t you come by my dance-aerobics class Thursday. I’m not kidding; I want you to come.”

Perhaps Mary Ann could get away with correcting grammar in the corridors and cafeterias of the Prince George’s schools, but I don’t think she’d try. She used to use her combination of love and sternness to correct the behavior of people she was certain knew better. She didn’t so much teach people as encourage people to act on what they already knew.

Surely, some of the students who would be corrected under the Bland proposal would know better already. Just as surely, many of them wouldn’t, and the almost unavoidable humiliation of being corrected in public by someone not your own teacher does not strike me as the most effective way to teach English.

Still, I’m a lot closer to Bland than to some of her critics who have complained that she wants students to sound white.

I think she wants them to sound intelligent - no doubt because she understands that the way we use language determines to a very great extent how people judge our knowledge, our intelligence and our competency. Misused words, haphazard sentences, failed subject-verb agreement can distract people from our ideas and get them concentrating only on our inadequacies. Good English, carefully spoken and written, can open more doors than a college degree. Bad English can slam doors we don’t even know about.

What is true generally is doubly true for minority youngsters.

Maybe Bland will consider a compromise. Let her encourage teachers to establish their individual classrooms as total-immersion language labs, where no street or playground language is permitted, where verbal precision is encouraged and where every grammatical lapse is corrected. The difference is this: Bland’s proposal would establish what amounts to language police, locking teachers and students into a sort of adversarial relationship, even during nonclassroom time. Mine could make the whole thing a sort of not-in-here-you-don’t game that might also involve having students mimic careful speakers of their own choosing. It would get them used to the sound of good English, not just its rules.

But whatever the approach, one notion has to be squelched right away: the insane idea that good English is “white” and not to be urged on self-respecting African Americans.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = William Raspberry Washington Post